Share the Pain

But don't look at our paychecks!

• In the past few weeks, Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman has called on parents, teachers, students, central office bureaucrats, and ordinary taxpayers to do their part to help the district erase a $900 million budget deficit: Teachers should forgo promised pay hikes. Students must do without sophomore sports. Coaches should be willing to coach for free. Class sizes are likely to swell. Taxpayers should expect higher bills.

• There are 53 departments, bureaus, or offices in the central schools bureaucracy, and the top remaining officials in every one—as well as many of their assistants—received raises, according to the budget.

  For example, Calvin Davis, the director of sports, was making $122,000 last year but now makes $128,000. He's the one tasked with e-mailing assistant high school coaches telling them they'll have to work for free—rather than the paltry $1,000 to $2,500 a season they were making.

  Communications director Monique Bond is budgeted to make $130,000, up from $111,000 a year ago—that's a 17 percent raise. Prior to following Huberman to CPS a little over a year ago, she was the spokeswoman for the city's police department and before that the aviation department. Last December Reader media columnist Michael Miner reported on her reputation among journalists for making it hard to get information about the schools and wondered whether that's what she'd been hired to do. I for one can attest that she does a pretty good job of blowing off my calls and e-mails.

• And Huberman himself? His budgeted salary jumped from about $204,000 to $230,000—a hike of $26,000, or 12.7 percent. Not bad in a recession.

Once again, Ben Joravsky of The Reader does the job that should put any other so-called "investigative" reporters or teams to shame. Go read the entire article. The amount of raises given out to upper echelon drones would put a sizable dent in CPS's $900 million deficit. This article in and of itself ought to be enough to get Daley voted out of office in a year.